


the fanged god

by jasondont (minigami)



Series: ontography [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: The Clone Wars (2008) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Alternate Universe - Hellblazer, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Ambiguous/Open Ending, CT-7567 | Rex/Anakin Skywalker - Freeform, Daddy Issues, Demonic Possession, Gothic, Haunted Houses, Horror, Jango Fett's less than stellar parenting abilities, M/M, Memory Loss, Psychological Horror, Rape/Non-con Elements, Unreliable Narrator, cosmic horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-07
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-13 22:13:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29907840
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/minigami/pseuds/jasondont
Summary: Cody has been put in charge of restorating and renovating an old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, things aren't as they seem.
Relationships: CC-2224 | Cody & CT-7567 | Rex, CC-2224 | Cody/Obi-Wan Kenobi, Rex - Relationship, The Son | Fanged God/CC-2224 | Cody
Series: ontography [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2105274
Comments: 2
Kudos: 27





	the fanged god

**Author's Note:**

> idek. mind the tags, don't read if you don't like horror, so on and so forth. this has been a bitch to write. many thanks to svar, ben, pax, iratxe and the rest of the maulrex circus friends for all the hand holding.

**i.**

“Shit.”

The vinyl of the car seat is so hot it burns, but Cody’s too tired and frustrated to care. He leans his head against the headrest, hits it once, twice. “Fuck.”

He checks his phone: no bars. Cody curses under his breath. He peers at the house—it looks perfectly innocent, the white paint of the outer walls shining bright and clear under the afternoon sun. It’s so quiet he can hear the sea over the singing of the insects.

It’d be nice if it wasn’t so fucking hot. Cody reaches for the water bottle from under the copilot seat. It’s lukewarm, but he doesn’t care. He opens the door once again and leans outside, and then pours the whole thing over his head.

The car won’t start. That by itself isn’t an uncommon occurrence. His car is a piece of shit machine Cody bought third-hand when he was twenty two. It’s older than Cody by at least a decade and the fact that it still works at all is nothing short of a miracle.

Or so one would think—the fact is, for the longest time Cody’s car has been the only thing in his life he knows he can trust. Water’s wet, his dad is a dick, and his car’s immortal and powered by spite.

Cody blinks the water from his eyes and looks at the house. It’s empty—its windows look down at him, the glass grimy and warped in places. Its roof is missing shingles, and the tall, round tower in the corner shines golden and solid against the blue late spring sky.

It’s a beautiful place. Cody hates it with a passion.

A wasp appears from nowhere and attempts to eat his face. Cody scowls, curses. The thing won’t leave. The place is full of fig trees, and the fruit is still too green to eat, but the wasps don’t give a crap.

“Oh, fuck off,” he grumbles. “I don’t want to kill you but I will.”

The insect stops on the hood of his car. Cody sighs. He checks his phone again. Still no bars.

“I hate this fucking place,” Cody tells the wasp. The wasp twitches. It washes its face and then flies away.

* * *

That’s a lie.

The house’s beautiful. It used to be one of those hybrids of fortress, manor house and farm that once upon a time you could find everywhere in the region, their tall, golden towers like pale fingers pointing to the sky and peaking over the palm trees and the pines, and it still retains some of its former glory.

It’s bigger than it looks from the outside, full of long hallways and cool, dark rooms, and its narrow windows look over the overgrown fields, over the roof of the little chapel one of its owners ordered built close to the house. When he’s there Cody tends to forget that time has passed—sometimes Cody looks through the windows and he half-expects to see the sails of a tall ship crossing over the horizon, carrying with them the promise of either riches or violence, of horror.

The house’s _too_ beautiful.

And that may be the problem.

* * *

Cody grabs his phone and his bag, locks the car and then begins the long walk back to the house. The sun beats down on him. Cody feels overheated, almost dizzy. He walks faster, sweat dripping down his back inside his t-shirt. His jeans feel heavy and wet, and the ground is so hot he can feel it through the soles of his shoes.

The insides of the house, however, are cool. Cody fishes the keys out of his pocket and unlocks the door, and then steps inside. There is an old bench right in the entrance, and he closes the door again and then drops on it. The wall at his back is comfortably cool, and he leans against it, closes his eyes.

Something creaks on the first floor, but Cody ignores it. The house is old and it hasn’t been inhabited for years and years. It always creaks and groans and whistles: Cody’s had to spend a lot of time there alone for the past few days, and sometimes it’s like sharing space with another living being, with its own moods and everything else.

He sighs and opens his eyes. He takes out his phone: still no bars. It’s almost four: Rex’s free that afternoon, but he was going to hang out with Skywalker after work.

He stands up and approaches the kitchen. There’s still running water, and he opens the tap and drinks until he feels less like he’s going to faint. He returns to the entrance for his bag and then checks his phone one last time, just in case. He’s tired. He’s been doing his and his boss’s work and it may be the stress, but he hasn’t been sleeping well.

Cody dreams every night. He didn’t use to, but he does lately. It started when he began working in the house—every night he returns. In his dreams, Cody walks around the same rooms he’s had to mark down on his notes, quiet but intent, looking for something: he hasn’t found it yet. Sometimes he just stays in the garden, his dream-self looking up at the back windows, patient but full of a deep kind of longing.

The ones he likes the least are the ones that take him to the chapel in the back. They’re as perfectly normal as the rest: in those dreams, Cody locks himself in the old chapel. He steps inside and closes the door and then lies on the dusty stone floor. The statue from the altar looks down on him, its dark face unreadable.

Nothing happens. But the darkness pushes down on him, and it’s so cold inside—he always wakes up shivering.

Cody blinks. The big jasmine tree from the backyard is half-dead. Cody stops below its weak shade and rubs at his face. He’s forgotten his bag and his phone inside, but he doesn’t want to have to go back. He keeps walking towards the chapel.

The garden’s full of brambles and weeds. There are half a dozen olive trees, most of them stunted and twisted—not all of them though. The one that’s closest to the chapel is a huge, grey thing. The ground around it is dark with overripe olives, and it smells dusty and sour.

The insides of the chapel are perfectly common, as well—it’s just a small room, with an altar, the ugliest statue Cody has seen in his life on top of it, and two broken down wooden benches pushed against the walls.

The statue itself is—well. It’s disturbing, even if he can’t quite say why. It’s nothing special: it’s made of wood, darkened with age and lack of care, and it looked old enough Cody told the new owners about it—the thing’s still there, though. It depicts a woman holding a child, the Virgin Mary, or perhaps some unnamed saint. It’s dirty with dust and cobwebs, and despite the fact that it has no eyes, Cody always feels watched when he steps into the chapel.

Cody sits on one of the benches. It’s cooler there than in the house. He sighs. Closes his eyes. He feels as if he were floating. He’s forgetting something—the phone? It’s back in the house, with the rest of his stuff—but he’s too tired and too comfortable to move.

* * *

Cody likes the house.

It reminds him of his childhood home without all the baggage, of running around with Rex and his cousins when they were younger. It even smells more or less the same, of hot dust and pine tree sap and the sweet sour smell of citrus. There is a small garden out back, with the biggest jasmine tree Cody has ever seen in his life—he always tries to leave before it’s dark, but the smell of its flowers is so strong it sticks to his hair and to his clothes afterwards.

Overall, it’s exactly the kind of place he’d expect from the area: there are dozens exactly like this one, and most of them share its destiny. Very few of them are actually inhabited anymore: they are resorts or hotels or restaurants or banquet halls, or a mix of them all.

Cody likes the house but he hates the chapel.

* * *

He wakes up and he’s lying down on the floor. At first Cody thinks he’s still dreaming. But no: he hurts too much. And he’s too cold. Cody sits up, his heart beating hard and fast in his chest. He doesn’t know how he got there. He doesn’t know why he fell asleep on the ground. It’s disgusting, and creepy, and—oh. Cody curses. He stands up too fast, and his vision blackens. He stumbles and has to lean on the altar.

Cody moves his hand away, feeling as if he had touched something wrong, cleans his hand on his trousers, and then leaves the chapel.

It’s already mid-evening. The sky is pale indigo, and he can hear the cicadas singing, loud and hoarse. The dead jasmin stinks—its smell fills the place, too sweet, like rot or blood or.

Cody closes the door to the chapel. The wood gets stuck once, twice, but Cody snarls and pulls until he’s the winner. Afterwards he stays there, bathed in sweat and breathing hard. He feels—he feels dizzy and nauseous. He must be dehydrated.

Cody walks to the car, and then he has to go back to the house when he realises he’s forgotten his bag with his phone and his ID and everything else inside. He finds them in one of the rooms on the second floor and by then night has fallen. Cody’s phone dies while he’s using the flashlight app to light his way back to the car, and he stumbles in the dark the last few meters.

The car starts.

Cody leaves the house behind and doesn’t look back.

If he did (but he doesn’t) he wouldn’t see anything. The house is just a house.

But he doesn’t. And he doesn’t see anything at all.

* * *

“You look like shit,” Rex says.

Cody rolls his eyes. He grabs his brother’s beer and downs half of it in a long gulp. He sighs afterwards and leaves it on the counter. Around them the bar is noisy. It smells of fried food, of oil and cheese and spilled beer, and Cody feels something settle inside himself.

“Weird day,” he replies. “Where’s your tumour?”

Rex scowls, but he doesn’t raise to the bait.

“He’ll be late. Had something to do,” Rex replies. “Weird day why? The house again?”

Cody shrugs. “The car broke down again. Had to stay there until it started. Cell phone service there is spotty.”

“Really? Thought you said that car was immortal.”

Cody shrugs again. He really doesn’t want to talk about it. He’s feeling normal again, and tomorrow will be Friday. Afterwards he’ll have a whole weekend of not having to think about the house, about work.

“It had to break down sometime,” Cody finally says. Rex doesn’t seem convinced. One of the waiters places another beer in front of him, and he takes a sip, his dark eyes fixed on Cody’s face. “Rex—”

“I know. I won’t insist,” Rex says. It’s a lie, but Cody’s too tired to argue. He lets it be. “But it’s just—you look really bad, Cody.”

“Well, thanks,” Cody replies, dry. “Maybe I’ve caught something.”

“Maybe.”

For a while, they just drink in silence. It isn’t an easy silence, but it’s a comfortable one—Rex is the only person Cody can think of he’s ever been able to just be with like this. And it may be because they’re brothers: they’ve been each others’ best friends since Rex was born, a year and three months after Cody.

But sometimes Cody thinks Rex is just like that. He’s good. He’s the best person Cody has ever met or will ever meet. He’s too kind for his own good, everyone’s big brother. It hurts him, sometimes—people mistake his kindness for something else, for weakness. And he isn’t stupid, and he doesn’t actually need anyone to protect him, but. Well. Cody’s _his_ big brother. And he worries.

“I’ll go to the doctor next week,” Cody says. He probably won’t, though, and Rex knows it, because he rolls his eyes at Cody over his beer.

“I can pick you up from the house, if you’re worried about the car,” he replies instead.

“You don’t drive.”

“But my tumour does,” Rex says, and laughs at Cody’s face. “He’s never crashed the car while I was with him.”

“The fact that you think you need to point that out to make me feel better doesn’t, actually, make me feel better.”

Rex just throws his head back and laughs.

* * *

By the time Cody’s drinking his second beer he’s feeling like a human being again. He’s still tired and cold, but he feels—fine. He feels normal. He asks Rex about his PhD, laughs at the face his brother makes, and then listens to Rex ramble about whatever he’s doing right now. Cody’s been told again and again what Rex’s actually researching, but while Cody’s always been good with numbers, the thing Rex’s doing right now is so far away from the things Cody had to learn for his architecture degree that they might as well be in another language.

Cody’s so proud of Rex sometimes he thinks he’ll burst.

Skywalker arrives almost an hour later. That isn’t something out of the ordinary. In the half a year Cody’s known him he doesn’t think Skywalker has been on time once. By now, Rex has learned to work around it—he says it’s not Skywalker’s fault, that he just has bad luck and that he’s not great at time management.

Cody thinks that Rex’s just making excuses for him, because for some reason Rex likes Skywalker, but he’s trying to keep his mouth shut about it.

It’s not as if Cody exactly dislikes Skywalker, either—he doesn’t think Skywalker's a bad person. But he’s careless, and he’s selfish, and Cody knows his brother well. Rex has bad taste and a predilection for picking up strays—Skywalker isn’t the worst person he’s ever befriended, dated or slept with, but he’s just self-centered enough to be dangerous.

He’s also extremely weird.

Cody doesn’t see him coming, which is something of a feat, since Skywalker’s also the tallest person he has ever met.

“Hey there,” Skywalker says, out of breath, and Cody jumps, his beer half-way through his mouth. “Oops, sorry, Cody.”

He isn’t sorry. Cody rolls his eyes at him and grabs a napkin.

“Sorry I’m late, I had to help one of the kids with something,” Skywalker explains. He drops his bag and his sweater on a stool and then stretches. Rex doesn’t look at him so hard his elbow almost slips from the bar, but Skywalker’s thick enough he doesn’t notice.

One of these days Cody’ll believe someone looked at Skywalker and thought it’d be a good idea to let him tutor teenagers, but today’s not that day.

“It’s fine,” Rex answers. He glances at Cody, and promptly throws him under the bus. “He was also late.”

“Oh?” Skywalker turns to look at Cody, shit-eating grin on his face. Cody rolls his eyes.

“Car broke down,” he says, curt. Skywalker hums. He’s still looking at Cody, a weird expression on his face. He looks—blank, almost absent. “And out there there’s no reception.”

“Right. You were working on that house,” Skywalker says. He’s now frowning slightly. “I could check your car if you’re worried. I’m good with cars.”

Cody swallows his first answer, and his second as well. “That’d be nice. Thank you.”

Skywalker hums again. He’s still staring at Cody—his smile has faded completely. Now he’s actually scowling, staring at Cody with his eyes out of focus.

Cody glances at his brother. Rex shrugs, but he seems uncomfortable, and he doesn’t look Cody in the eye.

He’s hiding something. Cody’ll dig it up later.

“What are you looking at, Skywalker?”

Skywalker tilts his head. “Nothing.”

He isn’t a bad liar—it’s just that he just doesn’t care if Cody catches him not telling the truth. Cody scowls. He places his beer on the counter. He’s beginning to feel dizzy again, and there’s a buzzing in his ears. At first he thought it was the cars driving up the road outside, but it’s too low, too organic.

“Anakin,” Rex says. He places his hand on his friend’s shoulder, and Skywalker blinks and shakes his head. He doesn’t lean back on Rex’s hand, but he doesn’t move away either. Rex turns back to Cody. He frowns.

“Are you alright?” he asks Cody. He sounds worried. “You’re looking kind of pale.”

Cody scoffs. “Yes. I’m fine. I’m just tired.”

His hands are trembling. He crosses his arms.

Rex tries to insist and get Cody to talk, but Cody’s been dodging his little brother’s questions since Rex was four, and soon enough he manages to focus Rex’s attention elsewhere. Skywalker seems happy to leave it alone, as well, but now and then Cody catches him eyeing Cody.

The dizziness doesn’t disappear. Cody feels shivery and faint, as if he were getting sick, and he’s cold. He shouldn’t be cold—the bar’s A/C isn’t on, and the place is crowded and overwarm and moist. He makes himself finish his beer and then excuses himself and drags himself through the crowd, his brother’s worried eyes stuck to his back.

When Cody steps out into the street the sky’s black. It’s late, and Cody feels full and kind of disgusting. For a while he just stays there, smelling the smoke of other people’s cigarettes and wishing he smoked so that he had an excuse to stay there for longer.

He can see the port from where he’s standing. The sea is a dark thing whose presence Cody can feel more than see, and the cold, wet wind stinks of fuel, rotting fish and brine. It hits Cody in the face and makes the hair on his arms stand on end.

The bar at his back is loud. Cody swallows, his mouth sour and dry, and sticks his hands inside his pockets. He doesn’t remember grabbing it, but his bag hangs from his right shoulder and sinks into the meat of his shoulder.

Suddenly, he feels very alone.

* * *

Cody dreams every night. He didn’t use to. Until not so long ago, his nights were empty. He went to bed and he lied down and he fell into sleep and then when morning came he turned off his alarm and went on with his day.

Now he dreads the moment of going to bed. He makes himself: he hates the dreams, the nightmares, but he still needs to sleep. Three hours of light sleep are better than none and Cody refuses to be defeated by something so pedestrian as a nightmare.

But he fears the moment when he must turn off the light on his bedside table and close his eyes. It hangs over him while he goes through his day, like a ghost or a bad memory or a mistake, and he can never remember the dreams afterwards, but they always leave him scared and anxious and out of breath.

Cody dreams every night and sometimes when he wakes up he doesn’t quite remember where he is, who he is, and the fact that that’s the only thing that he likes about the experience scares him so much Cody sometimes thinks he’d rather never wake up again.

* * *

Cody wakes up on Friday like he always does lately—sweating and scared and shivering and hard—and he jumps into the shower with the lights of the bathroom still off and proceeds to rinse a night of bad dreams off of his skin.

Aayla’s left by the time he comes out of the bathroom. Their apartment faces east, and the small kitchen is full of golden light and already warm. There’s a cup with still half a finger of coffee in the sink, a plate of half-eaten toast on the table. Cody scowls and clears it anyways.

He likes the apartment. He even likes Aayla, most of the time. But he’s in a bad mood, and the mere smell of the butter slowly congealing on cold bread makes him want to puke. He makes himself some coffee and drinks it looking at the sea—it’s blue and calm and flat, like a mirror.

Cody tries to remember last night’s dream. He can’t. He doesn’t have to be in the house until ten, and he decides to sit in the chair of the small balcony with a second cup of coffee, his face facing the sun and the early morning air cold and wet against his arms.

The gulls are loud, louder than usual. Cody ignores them for a while but after almost ten minutes of irate squawking he loses his patience and stands up. He leans over the railing, trying to see. They’re on the other side of his street, and they fill the sidewalk, their white and grey and black bodies swarming over something.

The street is empty, and when Cody looks around himself he doesn’t see anyone else looking. He swallows and looks down. There might be something down there—a dead animal. Probably it’s just some garbage but now Cody can’t stop thinking about it. His coffee sours in his mouth and he swallows it anyway, his throat working.

Suddenly he thinks he can smell it.

* * *

When they were younger Rex and him found a dead dog in the shed behind their house. It wasn’t theirs. Their father hadn’t even known it was there until they returned to the house, pale and dizzy and scared, and told him.

It stunk—it had been dead for days. Cody had nightmares about the dog for years afterward, and he knows Rex did never again step into the shed.

(He did. Cody made himself stand over the place where the dead dog lied once and then he closed the door and waited there, in the dark, until he thought he was going to faint.

He thought that by doing that his nightmares would disappear. They didn’t.)

* * *

Cody rubs at his face. His body hurts. It may be garbage, it may be the wind from the sea—there are always things rotting on the beach, especially now, when there are no tourists to keep them clean for.

The street is warming with gulls. Cody is on the seventh floor but he can hear them as if he were down there with them, among them. He blinks and grabs the railing with his free hand—the coffee in his mug feels so hot it burns.

A car approaches from the road. The gulls fly away, and for an instant Cody is able to see what they were pecking at—something black and long and lying on the street. A white face.

The car drives right across the thing. Cody feels himself lean out of the balcony, the cold metal of the railing freezing against the thin fabric of his t-shirt.

The car disappears. Cody blinks. Drinks a sip of his coffee—it tastes bitter. He makes himself swallow.

There’s nothing on the street.

* * *

Cody goes for a run. Afterwards, he showers again, changes into a clean t-shirt, grabs his bag and his phone and his car keys and leaves the house. He doesn’t look at the place where he thought he saw the thing on the street while he drives away, but he catches himself watching the birds more than he usually does.

**ii.**

“I don’t see anything wrong with this beyond the—well. You know,” Skywalker says. He’s leaning over the open hood of the car, dirty with grease and dust. He’s also the calmest Cody has even seen him. Rex keeps throwing glances at Skywalker from the corner of his eye. He’s sitting on the curb, phone in hand, and Cody isn’t sure why he even is there, but when he asked Rex just shrugged.

“It stalled again on Friday,” Cody says. He doesn’t elaborate. He woke up lying on the chapel floor again.

“I don’t doubt it,” Skywalker replies. He’s frowning down at the car. “Maybe you should take it to an actual garage, but I really can’t see anything wrong with it. It’s old but it should still work.”

Cody sighs. He rubs at his face.

“Okay. Thank you,” he says. Skywalker blinks. He looks at Cody, eyebrows raised. Cody scowls.

“What?”

“Nothing,” Skywalker says. Rex snorts and doesn’t say anything—Cody decides to ignore him. He picks at the scab on his left arm. He doesn’t remember when he got it, but it itches like a motherfucker. Skywalker jerks his chin at it. “That thing looks infected. When did you get it?”

Cody shrugs. “No idea. It must have been in the house. The garden is a jungle.”

Skywalker exchanges a look with Rex, eyebrows raised again. Cody scowls.

“Okay, stop with that.”

“With what? What do you mean?” Skywalker turns back to the car. Cody clenches his hands. He turns to look at his brother. Rex is studiously looking down at his phone, shoulders hunched. He’s trying to keep his face blank, but his poker face has always sucked—and anyway, Cody knows him too well.

“Rex. If I have to pull it out of you I will, but it won’t be pretty,” Cody tells him.

Skywalker snorts. “Wow, calm down, it’s nothing.”

Cody tilts his head. He approaches the car and leans on the hood.

“Skywalker.”

“What?”

“Either speak up or shut up,” Cody says. Skywalker scoffs again. He turns to look at Cody, his dark blue eyes shining strangely under the warm midday sun.

“You don’t want to know,” Skywalker says. He isn’t smiling anymore. His face is—it’s not blank, not exactly, but he’s hard to read in a way that he isn't, usually. His words are heavy with bone-deep certainty—he talks like he isn’t so much speaking the truth as speaking the truth to life.

Cody blinks. He hears Rex stand up and approach him. His brother places a warm hand on Cody’s shoulder—Cody can feel it through the fabric of his t-shirt. Suddenly he’s very cold.

He can’t stop staring into Skywalker’s eyes. Cody swallows. He scowls.

“No, I don’t,” Cody answers. His voice is hoarse. He tries to swallow, but he can’t. He chokes and coughs, once, twice, loud and horrible. He makes himself speak anyway. “Tell me anyway.”

Skywalker smiles. It isn’t a nice smile. It’s—it’s like he sees too much, and he doesn’t like what he sees, but finds it funny in an awful way anyways.

“Anakin.” Rex’s voice brings them out of whatever they were in. Skywalker blinks, disoriented, and then he flushes and looks away. Cody feels himself sway. He turns to look at his brother. Rex smiles at him, crooked and contrite. “You’re really not going to like it, Cody.”

Cody frowns. He looks back at Skywalker.

Skywalker rolls his eyes. Suddenly he looks like he always does: gangly and awkward and scruffy and charming almost despite himself.

“I think you’re—haunted, or cursed, or something like that,” Skywalker says, blunt and without an ounce of self-consciousness.

Cody laughs.

* * *

There was a woman in the region where he and Rex grew up that people used to say was a witch.

She wasn’t. She was old and she lived alone in a big, sprawling house that once upon a time must have been a farmhouse but by then was just hollow and dusty and half-broken down.

Their father didn’t like her much, but it had more to do with the fact that Jango Fett didn’t really like anyone than with the woman herself.

She liked Rex and tolerated Cody and sometimes, in the summer, she let them cross her property to reach the road that connected to the town and gave them bushels of figs and grapes and strawberries that they in turn took home.

Their neighbours were always polite to her, but Cody knows they used to say that she was a witch. That if she didn’t like you she’d look at you with her right eye and place a curse on you and then everything would go wrong in your life. They also said they could lift them—that if she looked at you with her left eye and she liked you enough, she’d lift any curse you’d find yourself under.

She wasn’t a witch and she couldn’t curse anyone or save anyone from bad luck or sickness. She was just a woman. She gave them fruit and was never unkind. And that was it.

* * *

“Cody,” says Rex. He doesn’t sound surprised, just disappointed.

Cody winces internally and makes himself stop cackling. He considers himself more or less invulnerable to most of Rex’s judging faces except that one. He doesn’t like disappointing his little brother.

“Sorry, it’s just—really?” he looks at them, incredulous. This has to be a joke. “Cursed?”

Skywalker’s face is flushed red. He closes the hood of the car with a clang and fishes for the rag he’d left in the floor next to his toolbox without looking at Cody.

“I see things. Sometimes,” he says. He speaks haltingly, his eyes focused on what he’s doing. “Have since I was young. Something’s following you.”

He looks—he looks genuine and embarrassed and Cody suddenly finds himself feeling ashamed. He doesn’t believe Skywalker, but—well. He shouldn’t have laughed, maybe. Or at least not like that.

Cody chews at the inside of his cheek. He sighs and rubs his hair.

“Sorry,” he says. Skywalker pauses. He blinks and looks up at Cody. He looks surprised. Cody smiles crookedly. “I shouldn’t have laughed like that.”

Skywalker shrugs. Cody feels Rex twitch by his side, but his brother doesn’t move from where he is, his hand still warm and heavy on Cody’s shoulder. They’re of a height, built similarly—they look like their father, short and stocky but strong—and Cody leans back slightly before moving away.

“You don’t believe me, though,” Skywalker says. He doesn’t sound hurt—he sounds as if he’s used to it.

Cody shrugs. He crosses his arms and leans against the car. The metal is warm and dusty, and he uncrosses his arms again to scratch at a stain on the copilot side window.

“I mean. It’s pretty out there, isn’t it?” he says.

Skywalker shrugs. He drops the rag in his toolbox and then begins rooting for something in his jean pockets. Rex rolls his eyes and approaches him, Skywalker’s phone in his left hand. He doesn’t even thank Rex, but he smiles, small and satisfied, when he grabs it from Rex’s palm.

“Not as much as you’d think,” Rex says. Cody arches an eyebrow and turns to look at him. Rex’s ears are red, but he doesn’t seem as if he were—covering for Skywalker or anything like that. He looks like he means it.

“Aren’t you supposed to be very good at science or something?” Cody asks him, dry. Rex rolls his eyes and Skywalker snorts.

“Or something,” replies Rex, droll. “I’m just saying that you should keep an open mind.”

“My mind is already open,” Cody says. “I’m talking to both of you right now.”

Skywalker snorts. He looks at Cody over the hood of his car.

“You’re such a dick,” he says, admired.

* * *

Sundays are family days. Rex and Cody always have lunch with their father and Boba and whichever of their cousins is around.

Cody mostly hates them. Jango’s behaving lately, and the food is always good, and he likes spending time with Boba and Rex, but he hates going back home. He left for a reason.

He never skips them, though. He promised once upon a time he’d be there, and he always keeps his promises.

Cody oversleeps that Sunday. He wakes up in the middle of the afternoon to two dozens of text messages and missed calls and Aayla’s worried face. He’s sweaty and exhausted and cold, but other than that, he’s fine. When Rex asks him on the phone, Cody tells him the truth: he was tired. He overslept. He had an awful night and had bad dreams and that’s it. He’s sorry and he’ll make it up to them next week.

When Aayla leaves the room he leaves the bed. The sheets are so wet it’s as if he had soaked them in the bath. They smell of sea water—salt and sweat and something else.

Cody strips the bed and then steps into the bathroom. He showers with the lights off, as he always does lately. He doesn’t like it but he likes seeing himself in the mirror even less.

He woke up hard. He doesn’t touch himself—he doesn’t know why, but the mere idea makes him feel dirty. He stands under the cold water in the dark until it goes away by itself.

* * *

Coyd should have seen it coming.

Monday morning. He’s just arrived at the house—everything is just as he left it on Friday, but he checks the rooms anyway. First the ones on the ground floor—kitchen, service bedrooms, toilet, the small drawing room and the grand dining room and the library—and afterwards the ones on the first and second floors.

While he’s looking around the latter he hears something coming from the attic.

It sounds like some kind of knocking—it may be mice, or rats, or one of the big flying cockroaches. It’s late enough in the season for them to begin breeding. Cody grimaces and thinks about going up the stairs to check it out, just in case—he has to look at the roof anyway, he might as well do it now that’s not as hot yet.

But then he hears something coming from the road outside. The roar of a motorcycle, loud and out of place in the quiet of the late May morning. Cody scowls, nonplussed, and pauses with his foot on the first step of the attic stairs. The knocking grows more urgent, but he turns back and exits the house, his phone in his hand.

There’s a man stepping through the open gate of the property. Cody can see him clearly. He’s tall, and he’s wearing a bike helmet and a dark leather jacket. While Cody watches he unzips the later and then takes off the helmet—his light hair shines under the sun.

Cody knows the man sees him, but he doesn’t pay him any attention. He leisurely crosses the overgrown garden, looking around curiously, to where Cody’s waiting with his arms crossed under the shadow of the house.

“This is private property,” Cody tells him when the man’s close enough. He pauses in front of Cody, blinking in the sun. He appears to be in his late thirties, early forties. There are laugh lines around his light eyes, and his well-kept beard is touched with grey.

The man smiles. It’s a nice smile, and he clearly knows it. Cody’s scowl deepens.

“I know,” the man says. “Are you Cody? I know your brother, Rex.”

Cody raises an eyebrow. He doesn’t say anything.

The man keeps talking, undeterred. The white of his long sleeved shirt shines brightly under the morning sun.

“He asked me to come here,” he continues. “He thought you’d need help. My name is Obi-Wan Kenobi.”

Cody tilts his head.

“Skywalker’s brother,” Cody says. It isn’t a question.

He’s heard about Kenobi. Skywalker talks a lot about him, to the point that, at first, Cody thought he was sleeping with him. But no—he’s just. He’s just a mix of brother and keeper and best friend and something else too complicated to define with just one simple, straightforward word.

Kenobi lives in a big house close to the town center. Cody’s seen it from the outside—he actually went once, while he was a student, just to see it. It’s an old place, run down but beautiful, the kind of house that only a certain kind of people can afford to live in. Late seventeenth century, heraldic animals everywhere, beautiful stonework and an inner patio.

Cody knows about that kind of people—he’s working for one of them right now. They’re privileged and ignorant and superior, all at once.

“Yes, well,” Kenobi demurs. He has the poshest accent Cody has ever heard in his life. “I’m not—we’re not brothers, exactly.”

Cody scoffs, unamused. “Tell that to him,” he says. Kenobi’s polite smile flickers, but it doesn’t disappear. “Why are you here?”

Kenobi slowly blinks at him. The sun hits his hair, his white shirt. The sea wind ruffles his hair and Cody’s hit with the smell of bike exhaust mixed with cigarette smoke.

“My apologies,” Kenobi says after a beat. “I thought Anakin would have talked to you about—well. About me. About him.”

Cody’s going to kill Rex. He’ll do it slowly—he wants to enjoy it.

“We’re not actually friends,” Cody tells him. “He’s just my brother’s— well. He’s Rex’s.”

Kenobi’s still smiling. “I see,” he says. He tilts his head, jerks his chin toward the house at Cody’s back. “May I come in?”

Cody stares at him. He should make him leave. He doesn’t.

He wants to know what the hell Rex has told Kenobi so that he can later tell his brother why he’s decided to commit fratricide. He’s guessing Jango will also want an explanation.

Cody uncrosses his arms and cocks his head. When he turns his back on Kenobi and steps inside the house, he can hear the man’s steps over the dirt, if barely—the man’s quiet as a cat. Cody guides him to the library on the ground floor, and then watches while the man looks around the room. He’s placed his helmet and his jacket on the big wooden desk that’s under the only window, careful to not disturb the papers that are already there, and now he’s just staring at the books with an expression of his face that Cody identifies as one of genuine interest.

That’s very nice, but Cody’s got work to do and brothers to murder. Cody approaches him and the man turns to look at him.

“Why are you here?” Cody repeats. Kenobi turns back to the books, his hands clasped at his back. From up close, Cody can see that he isn’t as put together as he seemed when he was outside. He’s sweaty and dusty and red—his face’s flushed and there are freckles on the bridge of his nose and on his forehead.

This close, the smell of cigarette smoke is stronger, too. Cody doesn’t look away. He leans on one of the shelves and watches Kenobi while he raises a hand and takes one of the books. He’s taller than Cody, not by much, but just enough that it’s noticeable.

Finally, the man turns to look at Cody. If he’s feeling uncomfortable under Cody’s flat glare, he doesn’t show it. He’s still smiling, both distant and approachable at the same time somehow.

“You’ve been… acting strangely,” Kenobi finally says. “Your brother’s worried. He didn’t say anything, but. Well. As you said, Anakin’s Rex’s _something_. I don’t think they quite know what it is, either.”

Kenobi chuckles, and here’s where Cody would laugh with him, if he was a different man. But Kenobi isn’t, so Cody doesn’t. He keeps quiet, his eyes focused on Cody and a book on his right hand. His left is in the left pocket of his light jeans.

“So you, what. Decided to pay me a visit,” Cody says.

Kenobi tilts his head. “Not exactly.”

He sighs and returns the book he grabbed to its rightful place.

“Do you know what I do? What Anakin can do?”

Cody blinks. He laughs, just once, loud and on the wrong side of mocking. “Oh, so this is about the curse?”

Kenobi hums. He doesn’t look offended. Then again, he might be used to it.

“It is, yes,” he replies. He looks at Cody for a beat. His eyes move over his face, like he’s looking for something. Cody raises an eyebrow, and Kenobi’s mouth twitches, like he’s trying not to smile. “I know you think this is all a load of bullshit. But I must say I can see what Anakin was talking about.”

Cody rolls his eyes. “Oh, I’m sure you do.”

Kenobi snorts. He crosses his arms and leans his shoulder against the shelves, and the wood groans and sways. He doesn’t move.

“I think there’s something going on in this house,” Kenobi says. Cody opens his mouth, and he raises one of his hands. “Please, let me finish. There’s something going on here. It’ll probably go away once you’re done doing whatever you’re doing and leave.”

“Really.” Cody can hear the disbelief in his own voice. “Something like what?”

Kenobi shrugs. “This place’s old. Old houses usually end up acquiring a life of their own, and sometimes they act up. It’s—well. It’s normal. It’ll be alright. You’ll be fine.”

He sounds so very sure of himself. Cody snorts.

“Well, thank you, I guess,” he replies.

* * *

Cody follows him back to the garden. Kenobi doesn’t return directly to his bike: he takes a left and approaches the chapel and the olive trees. Cody tenses up, but he keeps quiet. He follows Kenobi silently, his hands in the pockets of his jeans and his eyes focused on the man’s light hair.

It’s almost noon, and it feels like it. The cicadas are loud, almost deafening, and Cody can feel the back of his neck getting hot; while he watches, Kenobi’s slowly reddens. Cody probably should say something, but he bites down on his tongue and looks away.

Kenobi stops right in front of the biggest of the trees for a beat. He looks up, a frown on his face, and then walks around the twisted trunk.

“What’re you looking for?” Cody asks. He’s curious despite himself. Kenobi hums.

“Nothing,” he replies.

Cody scoffs, disbelieving, and the man turns to look at him, a half-smile on his face. He’s standing under the shade of the tree, still looking up to its branches. The tree is old enough to be huge, to be tall—Cody remembers hearing once that olive trees grow very slowly. This one must be hundreds of years old. Maybe it predates the house—maybe it’s older than the town itself, than the cliffs behind, than the earth and the sea itself.

It’s just a tree. Cody blinks the sun and the sweat from his eyes and swats at a fly.

Kenobi points to the chapel.

“May I look inside?” he asks. Cody raises an eyebrow. “I’m just curious, I swear.”

That’s a lie. Cody crosses his arms and tries to stare him down—it doesn’t work. He ends up shrugging.

“Sure,” Cody says. He crosses the garden towards the small building. The door is open, as always, and the darkness inside seems inviting, cool and quiet.

Kenobi tries to step inside the chapel before Cody, but Cody doesn’t let him. His left elbow clips the door jamb, and he blinks, looks down and finds blood. Cody blinks again. The blood drips down on the stone step, and for the first time Cody notices the dark stain that’s there already.

A warm hand touches his back carefully—Cody jumps.

“Are you alright?” Kenobi asks. Cody turns to look at him. He presses his hand against the wound and nods.

“Yes, it’s just—it’s barely a scratch. I’m fine,” he replies. He can feel the scab from another wound under his palm.

“It’s bleeding,” Kenobi says. He sounds—strange. Suddenly distant. Cody looks at him. He’s up on the step and Kenobi is still on the ground, and this way they're the same height.

“Yes,” Cody says. “It’ll be fine. It’s just a scratch.”

Kenobi isn’t looking at him but at the darkness beyond the door, his eyes narrowed in an effort to pierce it. He takes a step back .

“I need to leave,” he says. He blinks up at Cody and smiles again—his eyes are still distant, his face weirdly blank. Kenobi roots in one of his jacket’s inner pockets for a while and then Kenobi offers it to Cody, and Cody snorts despite himself: who carries a handkerchief in this day and age?

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll get blood on it.”

Kenobi doesn’t move his hand. “It’s fine. Blood comes out. And I’ve got more.”

Cody stares at him for a beat, and then he accepts the handkerchief, the cotton cool and smooth against the hot skin of his arm. He presses it against the scratch and winces. It hurts more than he thought, a sharp, deep pain that seems to cut through his arm.

“I would also like it if you accepted this,” Kenobi says. Cody looks back at him. He’s got something else on his outstretched hand. Cody blinks.

“What’s that? Why?”

It looks like—well. A coin. Old and gold and heavy-looking. Once upon a time there must have been something written on it, but time and use have erased whatever it was. Cody half-smiles: it looks like a doubloon. Like pirate treasure.

“Shouldn’t that be in a museum?” Cody asks Kenobi, still smiling. Curious despite himself, he takes the coin from Kenobi’s hand with his hurt arm. It’s cold and heavy and when it touches his fingers, Cody suddenly feels—dizzy. Lighter. It’s not a bad feeling, but it catches him by surprise and he has to lean on the door.

He hears something, footsteps over gravel—when Cody looks up, he sees Kenobi with his hands raised, ready to hold him up. Cody rolls his eyes. He isn’t a nineteenth century heroine.

Cody shakes his head and Kenobi raises his eyebrows and takes a step back. He steps right into the sun, and he squints. His nose is already red, and Cody scoffs.

He waves the coin held between two fingers. “What’s this?” he repeats.

Kenobi smiles. He shrugs, his hands in his jean pockets—suddenly he looks much younger, closer to Cody’s age. “Let’s just say that it’s—it’s a gift. Nothing more, nothing less.”

“Right.”

What a crock of shit. Cody looks down at the coin on his palm.

* * *

There was a man down the road where he grew up Jango never let them even look at. He always said he was a crook and a thief, but the man knew him, even if he was too scared of Jango to actually approach him.

He didn’t live in a house but in a small caravan parked in a field. Once or twice the local police stopped right in front of the gate and went to talk to him, but nothing ever happened.

Once Cody asked why Jango didn’t like the man, and he must have been in a better mood than usual, because he answered. Jango said that the man down the road, the man in the caravan, was the kind of man who’d sell his mother and his father and his brother and his sister and his best friend for the promise of riches. For a golden coin and the promise of a thousand more.

* * *

“What’s this _for_?” Cody asks. Kenobi smiles.

“It’s a gift,” he repeats. His smile widens, turns almost mischievous. “A thank you gift for putting up with Anakin.”

Cody laughs out loud, surprised. The sound echoes strangely in the chapel at his back and he steps outside under the sun. He scoffs and slips the coin in his right trouser pocket.

“In that case,” Cody says, “just one isn’t enough.”

Kenobi smirks. “Oh, I know,” he says.

* * *

Cody waits until Aayla leaves before calling Rex.

For once, his car starts and he gets home at a normal hour. Cody eats lunch and calls his boss and updates him on the house situation and afterwards he naps for a while on the sofa, the noise of the show Aayla’s addicted to right now like white noise in the background. He almost sleeps the evening away, but she wakes him up when the sun’s still out and high up in the sky, a careful cool hand on his shoulder.

“You missed the whole thing,” Aayla tells him, chiding, her warm brown eyes soft. Cody scrunches up his nose and hides his face in the pillow. He’s under a blanket, although he knows he wasn’t when he sat down on the sofa.

“That’s what you’re here for,” Cody mumbles. Aayla laughs. Cody hears her move away and step into the kitchen, switch on the lights.

“You would have hated it,” Aayla says from the kitchen. Cody rolls his eyes.

She’s right, but Cody doesn’t like encouraging her.

“You should have woken me up earlier,” Cody says. He rubs at his face and looks to the right, towards the balcony. The sky’s still blue, but it’s beginning to change colours—when he fishes his phone from under the blanket he sees it’s past six.

“You needed the sleep,” Aayla replies. Cody scowls. He feels both better and worse—his neck hurts and he’s dehydrated, but he also feels more rested. He feels like himself.

Cody sighs. He checks his phone again. An email from his boss, some messages from friends, a missed call from Rex.

Rex.

Cody’s angry. He isn’t sure why he’s angry.

* * *

For the longest time it was just Rex and Cody. Jango fed them and he clothed them and he made sure they went to school and behaved properly, and he did all of those things well, but he was never really there. And they never knew their mother, never had something at all similar to one, and they lived in a rambling house in the middle of nowhere, and their closest neighbours were the old witch lady and that man their father hated.

Cody has always known that if—when—everything else fails, he can count on Rex. Rex is good and Rex is reliable and Rex is loyal.

Cody can fix his own shit. He’s never asked for help from anyone because he doesn’t need it. And a part of him can’t believe that Rex _talked_ about Cody to someone that isn’t _them_. It feels—it feels monstruos in a way Cody can’t quite explain to himself. He knows it’s not rational and he also knows that he’s never been an easy person to like, to love. He’s too mean and too angry.

But he’s never been angry with Rex.

* * *

Cody folds the blanket and leaves it on the couch, and then goes back to his room. He closes the door to the noise of Aayla singing quietly under her breath while she begins making herself tomorrow’s lunch and sits on the bed.

It’s cold. Cody stands up and approaches the window and checks that it’s closed, and then sits down on the bed again. When he does, he feels the coin press against his leg—it’s still in his pocket. He takes it out. Examines it under the light that enters through the window. It’s the oldest-looking thing Cody has ever seen.

He scowls and leaves it on the bedside table.

Rex answers pretty fast. He must have been worried.

“Cody? Everything alright?”

“Yes. Why wouldn’t everything be alright?”

Rex swallows. Cody can hear it through the phone. There are voices in the background. A door opens, shuts, and they disappear. Cody tightens his grip on the plastic and then makes himself let go.

“Okay, what the fuck is wrong now?” Rex says. He sounds—the dickhead has the—the _gall_ to sound annoyed.

Cody breathes in and out once, twice. He doesn’t actually need it—his anger has always left him cold and faraway.

“What did you tell to Sywalker’s brother?”

 _Why_ did you tell him, is what Cody isn’t asking.

Rex hears it anyway.

“Fuck, Cody. I didn’t tell him anything,” Rex says. Now he’s angry. Cody’s not worried—it’ll go away soon. Unlike his, Rex’s anger burns hot and fast. “Maybe I should. You’ve been acting weird for weeks. I’m worried, I—”

“I’m fine.”

“Cody, you are not fucking fine.”

Cody clenches his jaw.

“Don’t you fucking dare hang up on me,” Rex says.

Cody looks at his phone. He hangs up on Rex and then turns off his phone and lets himself drop down on the bed.

He’s still tired. He doesn't think he’s ever been this tired. It’s still early, but Cody lets his eyes slip closed, stretches his legs out on the bed. The evening sun licks at them, warm and heavy. It feels—nice.

He’s so tired.

* * *

Cody dreams. He doesn’t remember his dreams.

But he will remember this one. He’s back in the house. He’s in the attic. It’s empty—it’s missing the things Cody knows the real thing contains. The old furniture and the boxes full of books and the trunks full of clothes. He can hear someone or something knocking on the floor, and it sounds close to him, but he can’t see anything.

He blinks. In the dream it smells of jasmine, of the garden, of the sea.

Things change in that particular way they have in dreams. Suddenly, Cody isn’t in the house anymroe.

Cody is in the chapel.

The chapel isn’t empty. There is a thing that looks like a man. He is tall and pale and is clothed in darkness. Cody looks at him in the eye, golden and burning, and something tells him that he should look away if he wants to keep his mind to himself.

He doesn’t.

He’d rather go mad than look away.

The man smiles. His mouth is full of teeth, and Cody feels them—feels _it_ —on the crook of his neck, over his collarbones.

“You’re back,” the man says. He touches Cody’s face. His hand is cold and he’s very far away. “And now you can see me.”

Cody doesn’t speak. He has questions but he doesn’t want to know their answers and he doesn’t want to ask him. Cody doesn’t want to give him anything more than he has already taken, more than he will take.

“Speak,” the man says. Cody doesn’t. He keeps his mouth shut and his eyes on him. He feels as if he were falling. “You have questions. I will have you anyway. You might as well ask them.”

No.

“No,” Cody says. The man smiles wider. It’s too much. His mouth slices his face in half.

“Yes,” the man replies. He looks at Cody, cocks his head, and Cody feels a tongue lap at the blood from the wound on his arm. He should shudder—he doesn’t. He feels warm.

It’s hard to look at the man. It’s hard to _see_ him—he moves but doesn’t; he’s everywhere but Cody can see him standing right in front of him. There is a hand around his throat and another on his face and another one tap-tapping over his ribs. Cody blinks, tries to shake his head and clear his mind—but he can’t move. He can’t. He’s trapped. He feels his heartbeat quicken.

* * *

He wakes himself up. He opens his eyes—his room is dark. He tries to sit up on the bed, but he can’t.

Cody’s eyes get used to the darkness, and he immediately wishes they had not.

The man is there. With him. In his room. Sitting on his chest. His white face so close to Cody’s Cody can smell him. He stinks of.

He smells sweet. Flowers and dirt and cold, running water. It feels wrong. It feels as if he shouldn’t.

“Hello,” the man says. He presses down on Cody’s hips, its warm weight familiar. “I don’t need to do this,” he tells Cody. Something bites at his chest. Teeth. So many teeth. The dark is full of them. “I’m doing this for you.”

“No,” Cody says.

“Shh,” the man replies. He taps his fingers against Cody’s lips, and he clenches his jaw. Something slithers inside anyway. He can’t breathe. He can’t move.

The man shushes him again. He begins rocking—knees knock against Cody’s ribcage. It hurts. Cody can feel him through his jeans.

“It’s fine. You’re home,” the man whispers, breath wet against Cody’s jaw.

Home.

* * *

Home is Rex. Home is the dead dog in the shed and his father turning away. Cody’s not home.

Home is—he is home for the man, he realises. The man wants to make himself a home in Cody.

* * *

Cody opens his eyes. It’s still dark. He can move but doesn’t. The darkness pushes against his eyes and he blinks, his heartbeat buzzing in his ears. Cody can barely breathe. He gasps, sits up. He’s alone. There’s light coming in through the window—one of the street lamps. He can actually see. His shoes on the corner of the floor, his desk and his laptop. He left it on, and a light blinks at him, green and faraway.

He’s still wearing the clothes he went to sleep in. They’re soaked in sweat. Cody takes off his t-shirt, and then his hands stop on the top button of his jeans. He can feel himself, hot and hard, beneath the denim.

He doesn’t understand.

He remembers. He touches his own chest and—there. Blood on the skin. It hurts.

How? He turns on the light on his bedside table. Pale light fills the room. Cody sees the coin. He wants to touch it, to put it back in his pocket—he doesn’t. He doesn’t trust it. It did something to him—he used to be able to forget about the dreams, before.

Cody blinks. Why did he want to forget? What was there to forget? He feels his mind attempting to pull itself in two different, opposite directions.

He swallows. He makes himself leave his bed and stumbles. He feels dizzy and tired, more tired than he was before he went to bed. Cody swallows again—his mouth is full of saliva, and when he touches his neck it’s warm under the sweat, his pulse beating madly against his skin.

Cody lets his body move around the room. Open the drawer, grab a change of underwear, a pair of pajama pants, pad silently across the room and open the door, make sure that Aayla’s asleep. Cross the hallway. Open the door to the bathroom. Step inside.

Turn on the light.

Cody blinks, suddenly blind. He looks away from the lights and leaves his clothes on top of the toilet.

For the first time in days he looks at himself in the mirror. He looks like he always does. He’s lost weight. And there are bruises on his chest, a long scratch bleeding sluggishly. While Cody looks it drips down his torso and stains the waist of his jeans.

There are other marks.

There’s the scratch on his arm—scabbed over and over and still tender. There are the bags under his eyes and the marks of teeth around his left shoulder, too big to be human. Every time he moves the joint they throb.

He keeps waiting for something to appear in the mirror. A white hand, stroking down his chest. The white face of the man over his shoulder. The drag of knuckles down his throat. Cody swallows. He watches his own throat bob.

He scowls.

Cody turns off the light. At first he can’t see a thing, but slowly his eyes get used to the dark. He turns back to the mirror and waits, his hands made into fists. He’s still hard—it won’t go away. It—it disgusts him. He hates that it does—it makes him furious. His body is his. He is nobody’s home.

He waits for long minutes. Nothing appears on the mirror, and he can’t hear anything, feel anything beyond what’s expected. The apartment groans. A car drives down the road. A door opens and then closes again in the hallway outside. The sea swells and crashes against the rocks on the shore.

“Come on,” Cody says. “Come out. You’re here. I know.”

Cody waits. Nothing happens. He starts to shiver. Cody turns away from the mirror, and steps out of his jeans and into the shower.

* * *

He remembers the first time he knew there was something off about the house. It was the very first day. He was with his boss and the owner. They were talking about the chapel. The door was chained shut, and Cody was the one to cut through the chains and drag it open.

The musty air inside hit him in the face and made him stumble. He hit his elbow against the wall and felt the skin break and then he was alone. His boss was gone and so was the owner and he was left alone with a binder full of notes and documents and blueprints he didn’t remember accepting.

Cody didn’t tell anyone—he never does. He thought it was—stress, anxiety, lack of sleep. He didn’t want to worry Rex. He let it go and when things got weirder, he pushed through, the way he always has.

He should have said something. He should have complained to his boss—the work he’s doing is too much for someone like him. He’s barely out of university. He has never done a project this big on his own—Cody’s good at his job, but restoring a whole historical farmhouse without help is slightly above both his abilities and his paygrade.

But he didn’t say anything. To anyone. And after a while, Cody realises, he stopped thinking that he should.

* * *

After his shower Cody returns to his room. He puts on clothes, grabs his phone and his wallet and exits the apartment. On the trip down he powers up his phone and sends a message to Aayla. He’s got half a dozen from Rex—he ignores those, something that’s still too close to anger for comfort swirling in his stomach.

Kenobi’s coin is heavy in the pocket of his jeans. He was going to leave it there but—the thing is. He _does_ feel better when he has it with him. He hates that he does, but it’s the truth.

He drives to Kenobi’s house. It’s that blue hour between early morning and the last hours of the night, and the streetlamps are still on, but the sky begins to change colours to the east. He parks close to the port, and afterwards he stays there for a minute, leaning on the hood of his car, shivering in chill, watching one of the fishing boats leave.

Kenobi’s house is a couple streets down. Cody walks alone, his hands in his pockets, his fingers tight against the heavy, cold weight of the coin. He’s beginning to doubt the wisdom of going there, of asking for help—his body still hurts, and he feels dizzy, but.

It’s hard to believe. It’s hard to remember. He cannot understand a world where day-old newspapers, dog shit and white-faced rapist body snatchers coexist.

(Cody heaves. He stops walking and presses a hand against his mouth. He heaves again. He crouches between two cars and pukes. He keeps walking.)

It doesn't make sense. He doesn’t want it to make sense.

He keeps his hand in his pocket, around the coin. He grips it so hard Cody feels its blunt, dull edges cutting into his palm. In his other hand he holds his phone. He should have grabbed the charger—now it’s too late.

Cody probably should have told Aayla that he was—leaving. But the idea of facing her, of talking to her, of trying to explain… it didn’t even cross his mind. Cody can’t imagine himself talking about these things to her. Aayla is so—her life hasn’t always been easy, but she’s good. She’s kind and she’s funny and she’s normal. She wouldn’t believe him—she’d tell Bly, and Bly would tell Jango, and Jango wouldn’t say anything at all but he’d know.

While he walks his phone vibrates. Cody looks at the screen—it’s barely five in the morning, but Rex just texted him again. Cody pauses. He swallows. A knot of shame and guilt expands in his gut. He really doesn’t like arguing with Rex.

Usually he’d say he likes being wrong even less, but Cody can’t find it in himself to joke about this. Not yet.

* * *

_I’m fine._

_Sorry I worried you._

_I’ll call you later._

_Go to sleep, dumbass._

* * *

When he arrives at Kenobi’s house, Cody hesitates for barely a second. Its windows are dark, the streetlamp on the sidewalk off, and the street’s so quiet he can hear the sea.

The house is—well. It’s not the first time Cody sees it. It looks as it did five years ago: it’s big and ramshackle and it could do with some paint, with some care. Cody climbs the stairs and rings the bell.

He doesn’t have to wait for long. Cody leans against the door, the wood cool and wet through the thin fabric of his sweater, and he looks at his phone. Rex has been writing a message for five minutes, and Cody smiles down at the screen and feels the expression pull strangely at the skin of his face.

The door opens. Cody straightens and looks at Kenobi. He’s wearing a t-shirt and pajama pants—his hair is mussed and his feet bare. He still smells of smoke, and there’s a crease on the skin of his face right under his left cheekbone.

He looks half-asleep, soft and approachable. Cody swallows. He turns off the screen of his phone and opens his mouth.

Nothing comes out.

Kenobi’s scowl softens. He blinks at Cody, looks him up and down. Cody doesn’t know what he sees, but his eyes harden, and then he sighs. He nods to the warm hallway behind him.

“Would you like to come in?” Kenobi says.

Cody would like to be able to say a single word. He nods.

**iii.**

“Sit down, please,” Kenobi says.

Cody sits. The sofa seems to swallow him. He blinks and tries to escape the pillows. He’s in a small living room. It’s full of books and dust and old furniture. There is a crack that crosses the ceiling from one corner to the other, and the wallpaper is peeling. The only lamp Kenobi has turned on floods the small room with golden light.

It’s cold and damp. Cody shivers and doesn’t move. The shadows seem to swirl in the corners, in the space under the table, in the gap between the curtains in the tall, narrow window to his right.

But he feels—safe. He doesn’t know why that is—he knows it isn’t Kenobi’s doing. Cody fishes the coin from his jean pocket and stares at it. It’s heavy and cold. He carefully places it on the center table and then stands up and approaches one of the bookshelves. It’s hard to see, and he isn’t that interested anyways, but he needs to move.

His phone pings at him and Cody jumps. There’s a new text from Rex.

I’m going to your house.

Cody scowls.

_Go to bed. Ill call you later_

_Ill be there in 10 min_

Cody closes his eyes.

_I’m not home_

His phone starts vibrating. Cody curses under his breath. After a beat, he accepts the call—he knows his brother.

“Rex, go to sleep,” Cody tells him. “I’m—it’s fine. Nothing’s wrong. I’ll call you later.”

“Cody, where the fuck are you? Why are you not at home? Are you at the hospital?”

Cody hears steps at his back. He jumps and turns to look—it’s just Kenobi. He’s put on a sweater over his t-shirt and is carrying two mugs. Coffee. Cody blinks.

“Cody?”

“No, I’m not at the hospital, why would I be there? Fuck’s sake, Rex,” Cody rubs his eyes. “I’m fine. Go to bed. I need to go.”

For a second, the only thing Cody can hear is the sound of Rex breathing, too fast, too shallow.

“Just tell me where you are,” he finally says. He sounds—wrecked.

Cody closes his eyes. He sighs. “I’m. I’m at Kenobi’s.”

Silence.

“What the fuck, Cody.”

“It’s—”

“If you tell me again it’s nothing, I’m. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“Okay,” Cody replies. “I won’t.”

Rex scoffs. “I’ll be there in like fifteen minutes or so. Do _not_ fucking go anywhere else. And don’t turn your phone off again.”

He hangs up. Cody blinks and looks down at his phone.

“Cody?”

Cody closes his eyes. He breathes in and out, and then opens his eyes again and turns to look at Kenobi. He slips his phone back into his pocket.

“Sorry. It was—Rex’ll be here in ten minutes or so. Sorry.”

Kenobi chuckles. He rubs at his beard and combs his hair out of his face, and then looks again at Cody. He nods to the only armchair in the room, and Cody sighs and takes a seat.

“I didn’t know how you take your coffee, but I have creamer in the kitchen if you’d like,” Kenobi says. Cody shakes his head.

“Black’s fine,” he replies. He cradles the mug between his palms. It’s too hot to drink but the warmth seeps to his bones. “Thank you.”

“It’s okay.”

Cody chews the insides of his mouth. He raises his eyes from the mug and looks at Kenobi. The man’s staring right at him, his blue eyes cool but non-judgemental. He exudes patience and a kind of alertness that, for some reason, puts Cody at ease.

“Sorry for just. Knocking on your door at five in the morning,” Cody begins. He looks at the coin, still on the center table, and then back at Kenobi. He tries to find the words for what he wants, for what he _needs_ to say, but it’s hard. He’s still tired, and his—he hurts.

But reality is beginning to seep in. He also feels kind of ridiculous and stupid.

“It’s alright,” Kenobi says when it’s clear Cody isn’t going to keep talking. He takes a sip of his coffee and grimaces. Cody blinks, and watches while Kenobi carefully places the mug back on the table. “Are you okay?”

Cody nods. Kenobi raises an eyebrow.

He jerks his chin to the coin on the table. “I’m guessing you found that useful.”

Cody tilts his head.

“I wouldn’t know,” he replies mildly. “I don’t know what it is.”

“Well. It’s a coin.”

Cody’s right hand twitches, and Kenobi snorts. “Sorry,” he says. “Bad joke.”

“I saw something,” Cody says. Kenobi’s smile fades away. “I had. I.”

He doesn’t know how to explain. He can’t make the words work like he wants them to. His hands begin trembling, and Cody carefully places the coffee mug on the table.

He can’t breathe. He doesn’t want Rex to see him like this. Cody closes his eyes and hides his face in his hands.

“Cody?”

Warm hands over his. Cody’s so cold.

Kenobi mutters a curse. It sounds ridiculous in his fancy accent. He clears his throat and begins speaking, his voice measured and low.

“The coin is an amulet. It’s old and powerful and designed to hide and conceal and protect. It’s like this house. This house is like the coin but bigger and better. Nothing can touch you here. It was built by a lady in the late seventeenth century. I found her diaries last year in a box in the attic. She was completely mad but she knew what she was doing and she was so rich she bulldozed right through the Church and her family’s political rivals when they tried to stop her from finishing it. She disappeared somewhere in the Balkans when she was eighty seven. I had heard she was killed by some creature but after reading her diaries I’d feel bad for whatever thing was unfortunate enough to try and eat that woman. She’d eat them alive.”

Kenobi talks and talks and talks. He keeps his voice measured and his hands on Cody’s wrists and he doesn’t crowd him, doesn’t try to do more than what he’s doing. Words and words pour from his mouth and the things he says are stupid and sometimes it’s obvious he knows they are because he snorts and he stutters but it works.

Cody calms down. He dries the tears and breathes in and out without choking, and then reaches for his now cold mug and drinks half the contents in two long gulps.

“Sorry,” Cody says.

Kenobi hums. He stands up from where he was kneeling on the floor with a grimace, but doesn’t move away.

“Don’t be,” he says. He blinks and glances away and back at Cody. “It should be me the one who’s apologizing. I clearly underestimated whatever that house was doing.”

It’d be the perfect moment to explain, but Cody can’t. He doesn’t know how to explain the man to his complete stranger.

Kenobi laughs humorlessly. He sighs. He scratches his head.

“That bad?”

Cody shrugs.

* * *

Talking isn’t hard. Cody knows he’s decent at it. He can make small talk and be polite and charming when he needs to—usually he just doesn’t bother.

Not being able to make his words behave as they should is frustrating and humiliating. He wishes it was possible for Kenobi to just look into his head and scoop out everything he needs to know.

It makes him feel—slow. Stupid. Young.

* * *

Cody manages to explain about the dreams. He leaves most of the details out, but by the way Kenobi’s face loses its colour it’s obvious he’s able to read between the lines.

When Cody finishes talking Kenobi approaches the window and draws the curtains. The sun’s coming out, and the sky is flooded pink and pale gray to the east. Kenobi leans his forehead against the glass and stays there for a beat, clearly lost in thought.

Cody lets him think. He’s drained. It’s barely been twenty minutes, but they feel like a lifetime. Someone rings the bell, and a second later his phone vibrates. Cody jumps and fishes it out of his pocket—Kenobi’s already crossing the room towards the main door. A second later Cody can hear the familiar sound of Rex’s footsteps. He closes his eyes.

Rex smells of the outside, and he’s breathing hard—he must have walked there. Cody opens his eyes and looks at his little brother. He’s pale and flushed at the same time, and dark bags circle his eyes.

Cody lets Rex pull him up from the chair and then he lets himself be hugged. He leans back against Rex and hides his face in his shoulder and closes his eyes hard, so hard it hurts, and Rex doesn’t know anything, doesn’t understand, and he’ll stay that way if Cody can help it—but he’s warm and he’s solid and he rubs his hand over Cody’s back and cradles his head and for a few minutes everything’s alright.

* * *

“So you should stay here,” Rex says. “That’s what you’re saying.”

“No, that’s _not_ what I’m saying,” Cody replies. He scowls and crosses his arms. He wants to pace the room but he keeps himself still. Kenobi watches them from the sofa, cradling his coffee. If he has any thoughts about the idea of Cody staying in his house for a few days, he keeps them out of his face.

Cody didn’t notice at first—he’s very expressive and he’s almost always smiling—but Kenobi’s incredibly hard to read. There’s what’s on his face and then what’s in his head, in his brain.

When Cody looks at him, Kenobi just shrugs.

“The house’s big enough,” he says noncommittally. Rex points at him and Cody’s frown deepens.

“I can’t stay here,” Cody says. It’s not the first time he does. He has a feeling it won’t be the last. “I’ve got things to do. I can’t just— stop living my life because of this.”

Kenobi places his mug on the center table and then leans his elbows on his knees. He peers at Cody over his clasped hands and tilts his head. Cody scowls down at him.

“It probably won’t be a good idea for you to return to the house. Or to do it alone,” he says mildly.

Cody opens his mouth, angry—Rex is faster.

“There’s no fucking way you’re going back there until this is solved, much less alone,” he tells Cody, and oh, he recognises that jaw clench: Rex’ika has decided to be stubborn, to not let himself be convinced.

He’s standing right next to the window, the morning sun cutting through his face. It washes him out—there are bags under his eyes and he’s pale and wan. His buzzcut is has grown out again and the short curls make him look younger and softer.

“There’s no fucking way in hell you can tell me what to do,” Cody tells him, perfectly even. Rex crosses his arms as well—he knows Cody too well to ever be intimidated, anymore. He’s hurt, though, and the feeling crosses his face, fast and clear to Cody, before Rex wrestles it down.

Rex looks at him for a beat. “If you don’t take a couple of weeks to rest and solve this I’m telling dad.”

Cody blinks. He feels cold. “Do what you want. He won’t care. It won’t matter.”

Rex snorts. “I don’t know if he’ll care, maybe he won’t, but if that’s what it takes for you to behave like a fucking adult I will tell him.”

Cody scoffs. He turns his back on Rex and looks at the books on the shelves. He wonders if they’re all Kenobi’s, or if they’re someone else’s. Some relative’s. They look old and well-used.

The man himself left the room a few seconds ago. He’s in the kitchen—Cody can hear the sound of cupboards opening and closing, of cutlery against china.

“He won’t get involved. He doesn’t care. He never has and never will,” Cody says. He looks Rex in the eye while he speaks—he knows this will hurt him.

He doesn’t like himself very much sometimes—but he needs Rex to let this go.

Rex's mouth twitches, but his stare doesn’t waver.

“You can be as awful as you want about this,” Rex says, voice even. “But you know I’m right.”

* * *

When they were younger they never argued. They disagreed, sometimes—but they never really argued. Every time Cody got angry with Rex he went away until the feeling faded away on its own—and he knows Rex did the same. Jango was a non-entity—they knew they couldn’t count on him for anything beyond the most basic physical needs, and Cody and Rex closed lines as a way of dealing with that.

Now that Cody’s older, he knows his father probably was going through something and managing the best he could with two very young children.

That doesn’t change things, however. When Cody thinks about Jango, the image that first comes to his mind is the way his father’s eyes used to look right through them.

* * *

It’s a weekday—Rex has class in a few hours, and after another fifty minutes of tense non-yelling, he hugs Cody one last time and leaves the house. It’s then Cody notices he moves around the place with the ease of familiarity—it’s obvious he’s been there before.

It makes sense: Skywalker is Kenobi’s… something, and lately he and Rex are joined at the hip. But still—Rex didn’t tell him anything.

And he doesn’t have to. They’re brothers and they’re friends—but Rex is allowed to have his own life. It’s just that Cody isn’t used to it.

Kenobi returns to the drawing room. He has a different mug in his right hand—Cody tilts his head. It smells of tea, not coffee. Black tea, strong.

“You may not want to stay here,” Kenobi says, “but it’s really a bad idea for you to return to the house.”

Cody closes his eyes for a beat. He’s so tired he feels the floor waver. He blinks them open and looks at Kenobi.

“I know.” It hurts admitting it, but—it’s the truth.

A part of him actually wants to go back. Cody has never liked losing or giving in—and that’s what this feels like.

But it isn’t just that.

He kind of can’t believe that what’s happening to him is actually happening—that it isn’t all a very fucked up dream brought on by stress and anxiety and maybe an undiagnosed rare neurological disease or something like that. Cody can see and feel and touch the bruises—they still hurt. But they don’t feel real.

And he _wants_ to go back to the house. He _likes_ the place. It’s beautiful and quiet—it feels like something out of a fairy tale, of an old story. He likes the idea of helping restore it to its former glory, even if it’s just going to be used as a hotel or a restaurant. Bringing buildings like that back to life is why he specialized in restoration.

Or so he thought—now Cody finds himself analysing his own reasons for wanting to stay, for wanting to return.

He can’t remember if he’s always liked the house. And—that wouldn’t actually have to mean anything: people change their minds about stuff all the time.

But Cody’s found out there’s a lot he can’t remember. He can’t remember when he started going to the house, exactly—he thought it had been a couple of weeks, but when he looks at his email he finds out that he first talked to his boss about it more than a month ago.

And that’s terrifying. Cody’s always been proud of his mind, of the fact that he’s independent and capable and clever. He’s good at what he does—he’s intelligent and hard-working and clear-headed.

He doesn’t realise he’s shivering until Kenobi places a careful, awkward hand on his shoulder. Cody swallows and looks away. He had been staring at the wall, lost in his head—he doesn’t know for how long.

Kenobi’s hand is warm and the man touches Cody like he’s familiar with the idea of reassuring other people but not very practiced at it. He’s still trying, though—and he’s been kind. Kinder than Cody would have expected from him. The first time he saw Kenobi, the man seemed to Cody distant and cold if unfailingly polite and charming.

“Sorry,” Cody says. “I was—I guess I’m just tired. I’ll get out of your house now.”

Kenobi grips his shoulder once, his long fingers surprisingly strong, and then lets go of him. Cody blinks up at him.

“You can stay here,” Kenobi replies. “It’s—I know it’s, well, it’s honestly kind of strange. But there are many rooms in here I never use. And this house is—well. It’s special. It may not keep the entity that’s… haunting you away forever. But it’ll help. At least for a while.”

Cody frowns. He clenches his fists and looks away, back at the books.

“What about the coin?” he asks. He jerks toward the center table, but stops. “It—I felt better. For a while. It might—it might have been something else.”

Kenobi grimaces. “Maybe. As long as you’re awake. It’s—I don’t know what the being that’s. Well.”

He clears his throat. “I don’t know what it is—but it’s dangerous and powerful. I don’t think it’ll be enough. Honestly,” and here Kenobi laughs, the sound bitter and self-deprecating, “I’m beginning to think it— _I_ —may have made it worse.”

“Why?”

Kenobi shrugs. He sips at his tea and crosses the room to sit on the sofa. He places his mug next to his abandoned coffee one and lifts the coin. He makes it dance over his knuckles absently once, twice, before turning to look at Cody.

Cody doesn’t know what to do. He ends up staying where he is, shifting uncomfortably on his feet.

“It wasn’t enough to protect you from it while you slept but. I think it worked as—as a kind of screen. It screened enough of its presence that you're now aware of it. If that makes sense.”

Cody tilts his head. “Like sunglasses.”

It takes Kenobi a second to understand what he means by that, but he does. He smiles, small and surprised and genuine—Cody can almost see a dimple under the beard.

“Yes. More or less. The coin made it possible for you to look at it.”

Cody blinks. “I’d rather—I’d rather know. I’d rather know about it.”

Between knowledge and peace of mind, Cody will always choose knowledge.

Mirth flees Kenobi’s face. “Yes. But in my experience this kind of entity likes it much better when you’re able to see them—they like being perceived and paid attention to. They _like_ being seen.”

* * *

An eye.

That’s what the thing in the chapel reminds Cody of. An eye, watchful and fixed on him. He can feel the weight of its attention still, sticky and heavy like fever sweat. It may not see him now—but it’s still watching Cody.

It won’t ever stop looking at him.

And Cody wonders: why him? Why now?

* * *

Kenobi shifts on the sofa. He drinks his tea, his face tired but his eyes alert. He seems very far away, but when Cody shifts his weight and approaches the books again he blinks and turns to Cody.

For a while he lets Cody be, and when Cody turns to look at him, asking for permission to look at the books without words, he nods.

There’s a bit of everything: natural histories, fiction, a couple volumes of poetry. Most of the books are old—old enough Cody feels clumsy and rough when he takes them out of the shelf, the paper on the cover rough and stained and the spines cracking ominously when he opens them.

“Do you like reading?” Kenobi asks him. Cody hums. He shrugs.

“I guess. Haven’t had much time to read lately, though,” he replies, and then blinks. He pauses, his right hand splayed on the page of a treatise on fungi, and thinks back to what he just said.

He can’t remember when was the last time he read a book. He swallows. Turns the page.

He hears Kenobi stand up and cross the room towards him. Cody looks at him over his shoulder. Kenobi looks—his face is blank. Cody tilts his head at him, a frown on his.

“What?”

Kenobi clasps his hands at his back. It changes him: suddenly he isn’t a man in his pajamas, soft and almost kind—he’s something else. Someone else, maybe. Stern and unyielding and so cold. Ruthless.

“I’d like to show you something,” Kenobi says.

* * *

They cross the house. It’s morning and it’s almost summer, but shadows love it—its insides are dim and grey and dusty and cool.

While they walk Kenobi talks. He tells Cody what he’s going to show him (a man that’s not a man, stuck inside a mirror: something awful and beautiful and extraordinary). He tells him _why_ (the man in the mirror isn’t actually a man and therefore will be able to see what they cannot).

His words curl inside Cody’s brain, sit heavy in his stomach. He doesn’t actually believe them: he’s seen and felt the impossible, but there’s a part of Cody who nonetheless can’t—won’t—take that last leap of faith.

It just doesn’t fit in with the way he sees the world, with the way he understands himself and his place in it.

Kenobi says: I keep a mirror with a monster trapped inside in my house. He will look at you and, if he’s in the mood, he will tell you what he sees.

Cody doesn’t laugh. He’s too tired to laugh. But he tilts his head and thinks: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all:”

* * *

The room where Kenobi keeps his monster is small and bare and very cold. There is a wooden chair placed in front of the mirror and that’s it.

At first nothing happens. Kenobi’s tense. He left his cup of tea in the living room and he looks like he’d rather be anywhere but there.

If he knew him any better, Cody would ask Kenobi why keep something he hates so much in his home.

But Cody doesn’t know him—so he keeps quiet and stares at the mirror. It’s a big, ugly thing. It looks heavy.

They wait there for a long time. It may not be that long, but it feels like it is—Cody shifts his weight and sticks his hands in the pocket of his hoodie. His hands find the coin; he hadn’t realised he had it with him. He frowns.

Kenobi.

“Kenobi.”

Cody jumps. Suddenly, Kenobi’s closer to him—he can feel the other man leaning against his shoulder. Cody looks at the mirror—his thoughts had drifted away; he’s so tired, he’s falling asleep on his feet—and blinks.

He scowls.

“What are you?” Cody says. The man in the mirror pauses. He turns to look at Cody and cocks his head. His red and black face is stark under the golden morning light; there are horns on his head, yellowish and sharp. His eyes are yellow. When he grins, his thin lips reveal a very big mouth full of fangs. He wears black.

“I am myself, child,” the man says. He approaches them, and Cody observes, fascinated, how his breath mists up the mirror.

Cody raises an eyebrow. He tilts his head. For a while they watch each other, and the man’s wide grin fades away and turns into a scowl.

“What have you brought me, Kenobi?” he suddenly says. “He looks familiar.”

Cody blinks. He turns to look at Kenobi.

Rex?

Kenobi isn’t looking at him. He smiles at the man in the mirror, grimly, without showing him his teeth.

“Look closer, Maul,” he tells— _orders_ —the man in the mirror. Maul scowls. He narrows his golden eyes and his clawed hands turn into fists. He paces the room.

“You know my price, Kenobi,” he says. Kenobi looks solid, like he’ll stay there forever and a day if he thinks it’s necessary.

“I do,” is Kenobi’s reply. Cody opens his mouth, annoyed, but Kenobi just places a hand on his shoulder. “Do your part and I’ll pay it.”

Maul sniffs. He stops pacing and pauses in front of them.

“Come closer,” he says, looking at Cody. “Let me look at you.”

Cody stays where he is and crosses his arms. Maul scowls. He sniffs again.

“Very well,” he says. He looks at Cody with his yellow eyes, hands clasped at his back and back very straight. He’s an ink drawing of a man.

He stays very still while he stares at Cody, his jaw working and his shoulders tense. Suddenly he blinks. He laughs, loud and deep—his jaw clicks, and his mouth hinges open, the black and red skin of his cheeks stretched thin over pale bone.

Cody looks away.

“Oh, you know what I am, little man,” Maul says. “You have seen something like me before. Haven’t you.”

Cody scowls. He doesn’t look at Kenobi, but he can feel how tense he is: his long fingers are digging into Cody’s shoulder.

“What are you?” Cody asks again. Maul stops laughing. His mouth clicks shut. He begins pacing once again—he’s like a beast in a cage.

“I am myself,” Maul repeats. “The one who haunts you, whose claws have dug deep and whose teeth have drawn blood and whose eyes watch you even now is himself. You keep him within you, and he keeps you.”

“Maul,” Kenobi says. His voice is frozen. “A name.”

Maul stares at him. His mouth twitches. His eyes glance at Cody and back at Kenobi. He shrugs.

“He doesn’t have one,” he says. “He was once night. A sharp smile in the dark.”

Maul nods his head at Cody, the gesture weirdly formal.

“He knows,” Maul says. “If someone should know his name, it is him. Not me.”

“I don’t know his name,” Cody snarls. “I don’t want to.”

For a beat, Maul just looks at him. “Names have power,” he says. He has a nice voice: he sounds like gravel in a velvet glove. “Name him. He already has you. Might as well take something from him in turn.”

Maul falls quiet. He dips his head at Cody again. “Goodbye,” he says. “And good luck, child.”

And then he turns on his heel, exits the room and closes the door at his back.

* * *

A name.

Cody doesn’t want to give him— _it_ —anything. It’s taken so much already: it feels like giving in. Like giving up.

But something in Maul’s words—something about the inhuman monster trapped in the mirror—resonates with him.

Cody follows Kenobi out of the room. The man’s quiet, and Cody’s more than happy to share the silence. He thinks.

He remembers.

The dead dog in the shed. The dark and the rot and the nightmares. And his father, his wide hands on Cody’s wet face. Jango told him then that one could not fight the dark: the dark just is, the same way death just is. You cannot fight it: you can understand it and learn to live with it and sometimes even ignore it: but it is not a thing to be defeated. It just is.

Cody has yet to learn how not to fight—but he isn’t a child anymore. He now knows the shed was empty and that the monsters he saw in his dreams were just that: monsters he saw in his dreams.

Something haunts him. He can’t fight it; he can barely believe it exists. It wants to make a home in his heart, in his guts, in his brain and in his blood.

Cody doesn’t understand what it is that haunts him, but he knows homes. He knows houses. He’s an architect: he knows how they work.

Cody will make the fanged god a room in his heart, in the same place where he once kept the dog, and then he will destroy the key.


End file.
